If you just unloaded your original DS on Ebay and replaced it with a DS Lite, you'll soon be outdated again. During their Fall Press Conference in Japan, Nintendo announced its new DSi, the "third platform" in the DS handheld gaming hardware series.

The new version comes a little thinner than the model it's replacing while offering 17 percent larger screens at 3.25 inches each. Certain "audio enhancements" have been made, but arguably the biggest addition is the inclusion of a .3 megapixel camera capable of 640x480 resolution.

Old school gamers won't have any place to put their Gameboy Advance cartridges, as the GBA slot has been removed. Instead the DSi comes with an SD memory card slot. The DSi also features a built-in browser, and gamers will be able to download games and other DSiWare from Nintendo's DSi Shop. As is sadly the trend, pricing is based on a points scale, and customers will start off with 1,000 free points that must be used by March 2010.

Japan will get first crack at the DSi this November for roughly $180 USD, with other markets to follow sometime next year.

Game publisher Electronic Arts has been catching a great deal of flak over its decision to saddle Spore with SecuROM inspired DRM. What was to be a hotly anticipated creature creator game now stands as a product to be made an example of by angry PC gamers who have the nerve to want to be treated like a consumer rather than a potential thief. Well over 2,000 Amazon 'customer reviews' have Spore pegged with a 1.5 star rating, most of which feature angry rhetoric over Spore's DRM, which limits users to three activations As one reviewer put it, "this basically means that you are actually RENTING the game, instead of owning it."

But is EA being unreasonable? The publisher claims the three PC limit essentially represents a balance of meeting the needs of the largest portion of its user base while still limiting piracy. EA notes that, according to its own stats, less than 25 percent of its customers ever activate a game on more than one machine, and those that wish to activate on more than three accounts fall into the under one percentile.

It doesn't matter that you rarely, if ever, saw Scrappy-Doo get into a fight, because you always knew that given the chance, he'd be ready to throw down no matter who the opponent was. Apparently that same spunkiness doesn't translate into the tech industry. How many times did we hear about Microsoft promising a hostile takeover of Yahoo its demands weren't met? Skip ahead a few months and Microsoft is still Microsoft, while Yahoo is still Yahoo.

Now it's Electronic Arts who is backing down in its hostile takeover bid, who earlier this year took it unsolicited $2 billion bid public for rival game maker Take-Two Interactive, best known for the Grand Theft Auto series. EA tried unsuccessfully to buy Take-Two back in February for $26 per share, and after the offer was refused, EA tried its hand at strong-arming Take-Two with threats of a hostile bid, only to extend the deadline multiple times.

The hostile bid official ended in August, and now one month later, so too has EA's interest in the company. Perhaps Spore is doing better than the Amazon customer reviews would indicate?

Had a chance to play Spore yet? If not, you're missing out on one of the most addicting games to be released in recent months, although you're far from being alone. For as much fun as it is to play Spore (and make no mistake, it's a crazy addicting game), what has long been an anticipated release is now being made an example of for any publisher considering using a similar DRM scheme.

Somewhere along the line, EA's brass decided it made good business sense to not only require online activation, but to limit its customers to only three activations. Exceed the number of activations and you'll need to get EA on the phone to request more. The idea, of course, is to stop or limit people from pirating the game, but not only has that already failed, but the three-activation limitation has the PC gaming community tossing pitchforks and torches in EA's direction.

Specifically, gamers have zoned in on Amazon as the meeting ground for their anti-DRM rally. In just over two days, Spore has been given an overall 1-star rating by nearly 2,000 angry gamers. They can do this, at least for the time being, because Amazon makes it possible to leave user reviews without actually having to buy the game, and that's exactly what has happened. Publishers, are you paying attention?

Are gamers who haven't purchased Spore justified in slamming the game in the form of a 'customer review,' or has EA brought this on themselves with its draconian DRM scheme? Hit the jump to post your thoughts.

Despite what the console crowd may like to claim, PC gaming isn't going anywhere. But just because the death knell isn't ringing doesn't mean gamers should be complacent with the current state of the industry. That's the stance Stardock purports to claim with the announcement of The Gamer's Bill of Rights, what the company calls "a statement of principles that it hopes will encourage the PC game industry to adopt standards that are more supportive of PC gamers."

First on the list of the rights states "Gamers shall have the right to return games that don't work with their computers for a full refund." Taking a practice what you preach policy, Stardock has put in place a policy where consumers can return their copy of The Political Machine at retail for a full refund if their PC wasn't sufficient to run the game.

Electronic Arts' infatuation with rival video game maker Take-Two Interactive have been anything but secret, nor has Take-Two's rejection. In late February, Take-Two publicly rejected EA's unsolicited takeover bid worth roughly $2 billion, a move Take-Two accused of being "opportunistic" with Grand Theft Auto IV nearing release. Not taking the rejection well, EA threatened with a hostile takeover in the following months, but has since backed down.

Now it appears the two game makers may be on the road to recovery, but unlike the previous spats, the current negotiations are being kept secret. According to EA's recent regulatory filing, both companies have signed a confidentiality agreement after agreeing to hold private talks about a potential transaction.

"As a result, EA does not intend to make any further announcements regarding the status of any discussions or negotiations with Take-Two unless and until discussions between EA and Take-Two have been terminated or such parties have entered into a transaction," EA wrote.

3DFX changed the gaming landscape forever when it brought 3D graphics to the masses, and in a similar fashion, ray tracing technology looks to be the next big revolution on the horizon. The promise of photo realistic scenery has provoked both developers and gamers, but is real-time ray tracing in games anywhere close to being a reality?

In an interview with Tom's Hardware, Intel's Daniel Pohl talked about the API Intel is using to showcase ray tracing demos and what he thinks needs to happen before the technology will be ready for commercial development.

"Creating higher image quality even faster. That requires smart anti-aliasing algorithms, a level of detail mechanism without switching artifacts, particle systems that also work in reflections, a fast soft shadowing algorithm, adoption to upcoming hardware architectures. We have some topics to keep us busy," said Pohl.

In the case of ray tracing, it's a matter of the hardware needing to catch up with the software. Pohl and his team of ray tracing researchers have been "targeting future architectures that consists out of tens, hundreds, and even thousands of cores," noting an almost linear scaling of frame rates with the number of processor cores.

Intel isn't the only one looking to push ray tracing technology into the mainstream, with Nvidia putting on demonstrations of its own. Here's hoping the race to the finish line ends up resembling more of a sprint than a marathon.

The most popular game in the social activist fraternity and political circles currently happens to be “blame the videogames.” However, there are ardent gamers and researchers galore to even out the scales. Once again, fresh studies have reinforced the value of games in enhancing cognitive and perceptual skills among children; creating a breed of hyper-dexterous surgeons; and bolstering scientific reasoning capabilities in gamers. All said, there is a slight blemish with one of the studies having found that violent games lead to more violent behavior among gamers. Make the "jump" for all the justification you need to keep playing games.

AMD Cinema 2.0 is a technology every gaming aficionado, game developer, movie buff and filmmaker would die for. Photo-realistic 3D rendering is the Holy Grail that researchers and developers have been chasing for a long time. Now that AMD is unwrapping its Cinema 2.0 tech layer after another, it seems as though the wall of technological disability that has stood between virtual reality and the real world is about to be razed to the ground.

But for more details of the groundbreaking technology you will have to make the "jump" to the rest of this entry.

No one has been more critical of Nvidia then rumor and news outlet The Inquirer, who recently declared that all of the chipmaker's G84 and G86 parts are bad. The extent of the problem is still to be determined, but here's what's known so far.

A batch of bad GPUs have found their way into the wild causing an "abnormal failure rate" among certain laptop models

To deal with the problem, Nvidia said it was setting aside a one-time hit of $150 to $200 million to cover warranty and repair costs associated with the faulty mobile parts

Both HP and Dell have released a list of notebook models potentially affected by the faulty GPUs and are encouraging owners to update their BIOS as a preventive measure (the newer BIOS kicks on the cooling fan earlier than it normally would). HP has also extended their warranty for the affected models.

Nvidia has since moved on to its 9-M series GPUs, and in the process has presumably solved whatever problem affected the previous generation parts, right? Not so fast, says the The Inq. According to the rumor site, the fundamental flaw in the manufacturing process still exists, and now G92 and G94 parts are reportedly failing. The Inq claims that no less than four partners are already seeing the new chips go bad at high rates, and believes that Nvidia "is simply stonewalling everyone" about the alleged problem.

If true, another batch of parts could be disastrous for the chip maker, who continues to lose graphics market share to Intel and has seen its stock price plummet in the wake of a disappoint 8-K filing.

Is the problem bigger than Nvidia's letting on, or will it be this latest rumor that ultimately turns out to be the dud?